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Railroad Forums
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FANWOODGUY wrote: ↑Sun Mar 24, 2024 10:42 am I did not see in the report any reference to ridership by individual rail line or farebox recovery. One would think that would be an essential part of the overall report.I've thought so too, but that has never been included in these reports.
eolesen wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2024 8:27 am That's not a shock to anyone paying attention to state and municipal budgets elsewhere. And if there's no steps being taken to get away from defined benefits vs a retirement account for newer employees, it's only going to get worse.I am a new state employee, and some of my older coworkers pushed me to sign-up for the state's deferred compensation plan - essentially a 401k where I can fund it before taxes (but no matching), but get taxed when I take out of it when I'm retired. And I still pay into the pension fund that is a big question mark on if I will see that.
eolesen wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2024 8:27 am Metra and Amtrak have always shown ridership in their annual reports. Odd NJT never had that most basic level of transparency.This is New Jersey, we're not exactly know for being transparent here.
lensovet wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2024 2:26 am NJT publishes a fact sheet annually with a summary of their ridership statistics. It includes a systemwide farebox recovery ratio. The most recent edition is available at https://content.njtransit.com/sites/def ... GLANCE.pdf and covers July ‘22 through June ‘23. It claims a recovery ratio of 53%. For comparison, this number was 49% in 2007. That fact sheet broke it out by mode: 54 for bus, 68 for rail, and 26 for light rail (presumably dragged down the most by the river line).Very interesting that commuter rail recovers so much money. I would've expected that busses, which don't require NJT to own/directly pay for separate ROWs and have vastly less maintenance to them than trains, would have recovered more than commuter rail, but I was wrong.
lensovet wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2024 10:36 pm NJT/NJDOT owns a good amount of its non-NEC trackage. I personally wasn't surprised by the numbers because a train carrying hundreds of passengers requires an engineer and a few conductors. A bus can carry at most, what, 80 people per employee? And probably travels fairly empty most of the time anyway for a lot of the routes in the state.True. However, NJT still needs to maintain/pay some way for those ROWs, but with a bus, they don't have to directly pay to use the roads. A bus is still at the mercy of automobile traffic though.
lensovet wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2024 10:36 pm The poor performance of the River Line has nothing to do with its unionization. The funding is simply not there, the tickets are dirt cheap, fare evasion is rampant, and you pay less than two dollars to go 34 miles even if you do buy a ticket. What other mode has such a distance to $$ ratio? Alstom probably gets paid a fixed amount of money for the contract as long as they meet some bare minimum performance metrics, so there's no incentives to invest into the system either.Why don't they try converting it to commuter rail then?